Corn-burger With Everything

… and an order of chicken flavored Corn Nuggets with Corn-sweetened ketchup and a half gallon of Corn Syrup Soda. To go.

I wrote recently that I was “encouraged that even American politicians would once again acknowledge that truly sound economies were built on the soil.”

Toward that end, and because we are at large a sick, ill-nourished society, we must end the corn cartel. Corn sweeteners, fillers and fodder are doing us in.

Consider this from yesterday’s SciAmer online:

If you thought you were eating mostly grass-fed beef when you bit into a Big Mac, think again: The bulk of a fast-food hamburger from McDonald’s, Burger King or Wendy’s is made from cows that eat primarily corn, or so says a new study of the chemical composition of more than 480 fast-food burgers from across the nation.

And it isn’t only cows that are eating corn. There is also evidence of a corn diet in chicken sandwiches, and even French fries get a good slathering of the fat that makes them so tasty from being fried in corn oil.

CORN: It’s genetically modified and patented, soaked with Monsanto herbicides to maximize yields, planted in square mile monocultures in the parched and depleted soils of the mid-west, grown in slash and burn former tropical rainforests in Brazil to make biodiesel to get inefficient American automobiles to the shopping malls. Corn© is making some few American’s (mostly not farmers) famously fat-rich and most of us simply fat-obese.

9:00 am FLASH: NYTimes site hacked this morning. From a future July 4th (2009) edition: the war is over.

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fred
fred

Fred First holds masters degrees in Vertebrate Zoology and physical therapy, and has been a biology teacher and physical therapist by profession. He moved to southwest Virginia in 1975 and to Floyd County in 1997. He maintains a daily photo-blog, broadcasts essays on the Roanoke NPR station, and contributes regular columns for the Floyd Press and Roanoke's Star Sentinel. His two non-fiction books, Slow Road Home and his recent What We Hold in Our Hands, celebrate the riches that we possess in our families and communities, our natural bounty, social capital and Appalachian cultures old and new. He has served on the Jacksonville Center Board of Directors and is newly active in the Sustain Floyd organization. He lives in northeastern Floyd County on the headwaters of the Roanoke River.

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  1. Agree 100%. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at the high-fructose corn syrup propaganda commercials on TV lately: “It’s made from corn!” Drinking a soda must be practically like eating a serving of vegetables! *sigh*

  2. Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” goes into detail on this subject. It’s amazing how ubiquitous corn really is.